Collected papers on wave mechanics

by Erwin Schrödinger

English, German (translation)

Genres: Physics, Science, Nonfiction

146 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, sometimes written as Erwin Schrodinger or Erwin Schroedinger, was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: he formulated the wave equation (stationary and time-dependent Schrödinger equation) and revealed the identity of his development of the formalism and matrix mechanics. Schrödinger proposed an original interpretation of the physical meaning of the wave function.

He won the 1933 Nobel prize in physics with colleague Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory"

Reviews

[Abhijeet Borkar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The legendary papers that took us from the classical dynamics of Hamilton to the Quantum Dynamics.

[Jemini Willis]

The famous equation that bears Erwin Schrödinger's name encapsulates
his profound contributions to quantum mechanics using wave mechanics.
This third, augmented edition of his papers on the topic contains the
six original, famous papers in which Schrödinger created and developed
the subject of wave mechanics as published in the original edition. As
the author points out, at the time each paper was written the results
of the later papers were largely unknown to him. This edition also
contains three papers that were written shortly after the original
edition was published and four lectures delivered by Schrödinger at the
Royal Institution in London in 1928. The papers and lectures in this
volume were revised by the author and translated into English, and
afford the reader a striking and valuable insight into how wave
mechanics developed.

[Mangoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

One may guess it is mainly for historical interest that some purist or historian may still find worth getting hold of this collection of papers, translated from the German originals in 1928, which chronicle the astonishing bout of creativity and productivity that, exactly 100 years ago, led the author to propose his undulatory mechanics to explain hard experimental evidence of incongruence of classical predictions for atomic phenomena. Actually, there is more than that.
First, the introduction by Valia Allori is an articulated overview of the context and the margins of this collection, highlighting not only the main novelty, claims and achievements of the papers but also how Schrödinger's work in wave mechanics started in 1926 and extinguished shortly afterwards, essentially after Heisenberg's uncertainty paper and the prevalence of the Copenhagen-Göttingen school thereafter. Second, the papers show how much Schrödinger owed not only to De Broglie (as generally still known from any even minimal historical presentation of the subject matter) but also, and as much, to the Hamilton-Jacobi variational principle (which, on the contrary, has virtually disappeared from (all?) textbooks, while being instead a great intuitive way to justify the need of wave mechanics, exactly as it was for the author). Moreover, we see Schrödinger as master of analysis and solver of partial differential equations (a lot of the pages are dedicated to scrupulous proving the (in)existence of solutions to equations, and thereby of "proper values" and "proper functions", and only later to their interpretation); concerned with attempting a realist interpretation of his wave function in spite of it inhabiting the abstract configuration space (in few points he refers to it as "mechanical field scalar", ultimately converging to an electrodynamic interpretation as charge density; interestingly, Born's rule was published almost at the same time, not with the favor of Schrödinger); generally gravitating toward an undulatory or vibrational interpretation (and therein, visualization) of atomic phenomena, whereby vibration modes, nodes and resonances might do away with quantum jumps and light quanta.
His writing is egregious and crystalline, and yet warm and engaging (this was still the time before peer reviewing, and one can feel parts of the text are rather soliloquies or admission of respect and debt to forerunners). One can recognize more generally the thinker and philosopher behind the physicist.
Unfortunately the LaTeX formatting is still bugged by many typos; and curiously, though partly understandably, the December 1926 paper in Physical Review (whose original itself was written in English) is missing. Nevertheless, a booklet to cherish, not only for historical value.